Modern superheroes don’t wear tight pants and flamboyant mantles, they don’t bend steel or read minds; they tackle poverty, fight for equal health access, and keep people healthy by crowdfunding for safe drinking water. These passionate change-makers hail social responsibility as part of their mission, and come to the rescue of those in need.

Trendy innovation

Innovation in general has become one of the main drivers of economic growth, particularly for developing countries, where entrepreneurship ecosystem is still growing.

Every day thousands of great ideas are born out of social needs in the minds of these ordinary heroes. Some of those “what if” ideas grow into novel mega-ideas and bring global social change.

Social innovation, a trendy word recently stumbled upon by millennials, brings novel solutions to issues, or improves the existing solutions by finding more people-centered, effective, and sustainable approaches. Social innovation addresses social needs of all kinds ranging from community development to health. The key point of social innovation is to enhance individual entrepreneurial capacity for actions that benefit society through dialogue between citizens and state. This is aimed at increasing quality of government services in correspondence with the core needs of citizens and for social boon. This in turn, is aimed at breaking down the apathy towards one-sided road of policy-making process. Thus, the formula of entrepreneurial ventures for modern-day social entrepreneurs and innovators goes beyond the traditional profit orthodoxy.

What about Armenia?

Armenia, a South Caucasus country with GDP of $ 10.561 Billion, has been continuously supporting policies that sustain innovation. On one hand these are proactive government policies, such as OGP/Armenia Action Plan commitments that not only tend to make government more transparent and accountable to the citizens, but also allow direct citizen engagement in public policy via crowdsourcing and voicing the most pressing issues in social life. Reforms and initiatives including e-Governance and e-Taxation as well as tax exemption bill for newly established tech startups in Armenia add value to the development of innovative infrastructure.

Read full article on Kolba Lab’s Medium account.